Scoured Stories

A blog in which I release weekly episodic novels.

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If you've seen anything here you enjoy, and want to receive the pre-release chapters to any of my episodic novels, send me your email in an email to manuscriptstory@gmail.com with the novels you are interested. Give me about 24 hours to handle it, but you will receive a confirmation e-mail, and start getting those chapters the next time I release one! If you want to read a novel thus far, just send me an e-mail with the novel of your choice, and I'll send the whole archive!

Wednesday, December 8, 2010

“Do you believe in the devil?”“Jack, I don’t believe in God.”“I know that. That’s not what I’m asking.” Rory looked down and fidgeted with his MP5 SMG, not liking where this was going. No one in the SWAT talks shit like this before a raid. He coughed and shrugged.“You can’t have one without the other.”“That’s not strictly true, or logical. Both don’t have to exist. And after the shit we’ve gone through, Mr. Lucifer looks like a likely candidate.” Rory couldn’t argue with that. The last year saw a lot of “Fucked-up shit” (as the Sergeant so eloquently puts it), “Take that old guy, the one with his bones pulled out of his body. The coroner said he lived through most of it. Not until the assailant started to rip out the spine-” “Dude, will you shut the FUCK up,” the officer to Jack’s right said, the ‘fuck’ punctuated with a quick backhand to Jack’s chest. “If you’re gonna puke, then fucking puke. Otherwise, don’t fucking whine,” Jack snapped back, his hand not leaving the safety of his weapon. “Miller is right, man, that’s bad juju.” “Man, Carlos, when the hell did you become a Cuban?” Rory piped up, “I’m not sure juju is Cuban, man… maybe African or something.” Carlos shrugged. “It doesn’t matter, bro. We’re here.” “This shithole?” “Shut up. Miller, you have the carbine, right?” Miller nodded to the Sergeant. “Good. Stay outside the target’s window. Make sure no one leaves. Rest of you, follow Jack. He’s taking point. Keep your masks at the ready. He might be using gas.” Jack grimaced. Thank you, sir, for letting me know ahead of time I am leading this. “All right, boys. Outta the goddamn van.” Jack lead across the broken walkway to the shoddy apartment’s door. He tried opening it up. “Locked,” “I don’t like this, the sky’s fucking yellow,” Miller sent, to us, his opinion over the radio. “Unless you have something important to say, don’t use the damn radio, just stay on the window.” The Sergeant then nodded to Rory, “Break it down,” he said, referring to the door. As Rory kicked the door in, Miller said, “Uh, yeah. There’s no window here. Third floor, fourth from the left, right?” “Yes.” “Yeahhhh. No window. At all.” “Watch the surrounding windows then,” “Got it, Sergeant.” “Shut up.” Jack had, at this point, already entered the building. The other three followed him closely. “Maaan, I don’t like this, bro,” Carlos said, to no one in particular. “Where’s the fucking people.” He had a point. Normally there were old people, crack heads, somebody interfering with them, telling them that they ain’t done nuthin’ wrong. Like SWAT would be called because you did lines back in the eighties. But, even stranger than that, was the silence. No sounds of life. No babies crying, or dogs barking. No children screaming. Just the complaining groans of an old building and a spooked out squad. Stranger than that was the fact 311 had no door. Just dirty, tan wall where it was supposed to be. A 309 and 313 on either side. “Miller, are you certain there is no window?” “Miller, are you there?” “Miller?” “Damn it. You three stay here. Check the adjacent apartments to see if there’s anything else fucked up. I’m checking on Sonofabitch. Contact me if you find anything.” 309 showed nothing accept an empty apartment, no signs of struggle, no signs of packing. Everything looked like the people had decided to get up and leave, just a few minutes ago. Except the food grew blue with mold. The scattered toys clung to the floor with dust and cobweb. The bathwater still stood in the tub. 313 were much the same. No way to get to 311 from the apartment. They waved at Miller. He let go of his carbine to wave back. Then Rory kicked down 310, across from 311. Jack went in first, and he turned around, grinning under his mask. “Trooollll, in the dungeon!” The old man certainly looked like a troll. The polar opposite of the other apartments, 310 stood empty of anything non-living, and only had a man in it. While Carlos and Rory checked the rest of the apartment, Jack stood in front of the old man, and Radioed the Sergeant. Then Miller. Neither of them answered. “You’d be looking for my son, then.” The old man spoke slower and faster than he should. “Does your son live at 311?” The old man started laughing, not pausing for breath. “Damn it. Carlos, go across the hall and yell at goddamn Miller. We need the Sergeant up here.” Jack turned his attention back to the old man. Rory stood next to Jack, both staring at the man, who didn’t stop laughing. “It’s a shame we can’t hit him, huh?” Jack could only agree. “God DAMN IT!!!! That was gunfire!” Rory and Jack left the old man alone and jumped to the door. The door to 313 and 309 had vanished. In fact, they all had vanished, save for the one behind them. Jack called out on his radio, “Carlos? Carlos? Goddamn it, Carlos!” “I don’t like this. The sky’s fucking yellow.” “Miller? Miller? Goddamn it.” “Miller shot him.” “Carlos, what?” “The Sergeant, he shot Carlos.” “Who shot who?” “I don’t like this. The sky’s fucking yellow.” “Miller’s dead,” the radio went to static. Rory had ventured further down the hallway. “Stairs are gone too. Jack, I don’t like this.” “Where did Carlos go? The radio is dead.” Rory glanced back over his shoulder at Jack. “Dude. I’m Carlos. Then he turned back around, and slowly placed his hand on the blank wall where the stairs once stood. He exploded. Jack hid his face with his elbow, but still got blood in his eyes. When he finally cleared the blood out, he stood in a completely white room, no trace of blood, except on himself. Blood dripped off him onto the pure white floor, slowly spreading out. He took four steps forward, and reached out to touch the same wall Carlos had moments before, but it flew back away from his touch, and try as he might, Jack could not move fast enough to touch it. The blood kept rising, and the more Jack waded through it, the thicker it became. Soon, he would not be able to move, at all. In his frustration, Jack fired his weapon. Sarge fell, a bullet catching him in his forehead. “What the fuck, Jack?” Carlos yelled behind him. Jack turned around. Carlos’s chest had been opened up, his ribs pointing outward. His heart beat, but blackened and dead. Jack turned back around, and the Sergeant pulled himself back up, and started picking bone from his head wound. “That fuckin’ stung a little, Jack.”

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

“You… can’t… do… this…” “Bite.” “I’ll… sue…” the convict could hardly speak, his breath so spent. The masked guard punched the prisoner, spilling more of the criminal’s blood onto his orange jumpsuit. None landed on the guard’s hard, plastic armor. “Cruel… an’… unusual.” The guard punched the man again, and the prisoner bit down on the rubber rod, pock-marked with the teeth of many men. “You won’t sue, damned one, because you will be dead,” the Judge said. The prisoner thrashed against the guard. “Hit him again,” and the guard obliged. The prisoner lost some teeth, although they were held in place by the rod. He screamed. “You are making it harder on yourself. Just die.” The prisoner screamed, though it was quite muffled by the rubber, and the guard spun him around. “Do it,” the Judge said in his voice, leaning out of the shadow just enough to be seen for the prisoner to see a goddamn college student. However, the last thing that the prisoner saw, before the hard metal tips of the guard’s thumbs, were the guard’s bright, green eyes, glowing in the holes of his inhuman mask. The guard pressed his thumbs into the prisoners eyes, and, once firmly in the socket, began to pull the man’s head in half. The prisoner screamed as bone tore, then flesh. Mucus strands beaded with blood crisscrossed between the two jagged halves of the skull like bridges from hell. A bone fragment fell, bounced off the guard’s hand, and onto the floor. With a pop, a sickening, ligament-tearing pop, the right side of the ex-convict’s head popped off, his flesh sloughing off as the guard swung his hand out wide. The rest of his body jerked left. The guard then ripped the inmate’s jumpsuit open, then his bloody undershirt. Using his sharp thumbs, he cut a line in the inmate’s belly, gripped the flap of skin, and ripped the whole sheet of skin off, exposing muscle and ribs. It was now that the prisoner stopped screaming, although he had been dead for half a minute. The guard laid down the sheet of skin tenderly, looked back at the exposed innards. He cocked his head, as a child would examining a tree leaf, then slowly, deliberately, inserted his hand between two ribs, grabbed one, gave a sudden yank, popping out most of the ribs. A few more jerks, and they were all gone. He then removed most of the slippery guts, and grasped the spine with both of his hands, tearing the legs off the body. He then looked back up at the Judge, who nodded. The guard dragged the mutilated torso out of the room, the intestines trailing behind him, leaving a bloody trail. The judge picked up the sheet of skin… and began to write in blood.

Thirty years before, a balding man wakes up in a cold sweat. He died later that day.

The Egyptians or the Greeks, it does not matter which, discovered the Tome, for you can hardly describe such an object as merely a book, millennia ago, in a temple long since defiled, and found it to be too gruesome for even their mythos. Human flesh adorned by teeth and bone, each sheet covered in writing of a strange language- English- on flayed and thinly weaved skin, slimmer than paper. The strange, macabre sketches of emaciated humans being tortured and killed varied the color of red with pale greens and yellows. Every liquid in the book looked fresh, glittering in the least of light, even a thousand years after the finding of the book. Hand and foot bones inlaid on the inside cover depict nothing more than a rough cylinder. One bone disappeared every twenty years or so. After those were gone, the pages started to go blank.

“What do you have there?”“Nothing, nothing, it’s just a bundle of ancient parchment.”“Anything on them?”“No, they’re blank…” and in a history museum, a small bundle of parchment, no matter how old, isn’t that exiting. The museum director left the room. Harrison did not tell him what the parchment was made out of. Or that the people used papyrus in the part of the world the parchment came from.Of course, Harrison did not tell the director of the blood-red instructions written on the pages.

As a child, I believed if you left your arms or legs hanging over the edge of your bed, something would grab you. As I aged, I learned that nothing would, nothing could. My childhood fears of the dark, the bathroom, blood, even pain all faded away with the realization that nothing lives in the gloom surrounding a bed at night. And I was right. Nothing does live down there. That’s what terrifies me. Because something can reach up from the murk and latch onto your arms. These nightmares invade my dreams, too. When I can fall asleep, when I see these… flashes at night. Men, brutal, horrible men, dying, screaming, blubbering. Not even cursing nor threatening. Beyond scared. Beyond terrified. These men, who have committed the worst atrocities, have had their sanity methodically dismantled and destroyed by pain and horrors. The destruction of their body isn’t enough. The minds have to be shattered. I see what happens to the pieces of body that are left over. What happens to their broken minds?

Harrison closed his journal. His had filled his personal journal. He started it when he began having these nightmares. When he brought home the bundle of parchment over a year ago. Someone told him, a friend, before he lost all of them, that writing them down would help him with his nightmares. Of course, it didn’t. Only one thing helped, now. But the price of relief terribly damaged his soul. He knew that. So he only followed the bloody instructions when the nightmares became intolerable. And tonight he needed Relief. And it came so much easier for him to seek it each time. He looked at his list, although he already knew what he must find. And, written in blood, there it was… Bones of your Father. That was going to be harder than blood from his mother. His dad was still alive.Quietly, with his ax, he left for his childhood home for the last time.

He had aged, but was no less young looking. He had grown wise, in a fashion, but in a twisted way. His nightmares now only came when he completed part of the instructions, but he craved them, needed them. He stopped leaving his apartment except to complete another task. But tonight he would finish the final task on the few parchment sheets. He knew not how he would feed the bloody addiction afterword, but he needed his fix tonight. He placed his father’s bones, cleaved clean of flesh, on the floor, and doused it in his mother’s blood. He spread the ashes of a child across the skull, and a dead, gutted infant in its ribcage. Then, the ancient instructions specifically asked for this, a Darth Vader action figure. Then he turned off the lights.Harrison reveled in his atrocious nightmares.And when he woke, someone… thing… else resided in the room with him. “Little man, I can give you the blood you so desperately seek. First, however, I must feed.” The ecstasy of pain.

Thursday, July 15, 2010

I think I'm gonna release Chapter one of "The Sixth Chamber" THIISS Thursday. And a sneak peak for it this week on Sunday. Everyone... thank you for your support so far.

"The Sixth Chamber" will be more PG-13, whereas "Manuscript" is definitely not. Also, later next week, more in depth summaries on possible stories are coming up, so be sure to let me know which one you want.

I would also like art for my stories. Feel free to send a depiction of any chapter you want. The one I like best will be released with it, and put into the PDF, so anyone who "back orders" the chapters will get your art, too. Try to make it Inked, with minimum shading and coloring. If this thing starts paying... and with the hits I got last night it's looking decent, I'll start paying artists. I might even hire a permanent, should Scoured Stories get popular enough.

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Well, if you've subscribed. Otherwise, you can read the first chapter of Manuscript in 77 hours. It's shaping up to be gory and creepy. OOOOO. "Sixth Chamber"'s first chapter will be sent out two weeks from tomorrow, and I am currently working on a schedule. Thinking released every Wednesday, and posted every Saturday. Look for it.

Hello. This is a site for weekly episodic novels. There is currently one novel going, and I will post new chapters (typically 2-5 pages long) once a week on Monday. Should you prefer to read them earlier, you can also subscribe to receive them a few days early, on Friday, by sending me an email at Manuscriptstory@gmail.com. This service is one hundred percent free. Other thoughts and concerns can also be sent to me with the same e-mail.

The stories I have planned are ( * denotes planned, and is not currently being written, but going to in the near future. **means tentative, and plans can change):

Manuscript: Horror. About two books created from human flesh and blood. One book travels backward through time, the Necrochronicle, and is intrinsically linked to the other, the Carriortus, which is being created in the present. Carriortus is able to reach out and affect any environment the Necrochronicle is in, provided the Carriortus level of completion is equal or greater than the Necrochronicle, which becomes more complex the further back in time it travels. One the Carriortus is complete, the owner will be able to reach back in time to the beginning of humanity, bending it to his will. The heroes are good people able to destroy the Necrochronicle throughout time, from different eras, and the Carriortus's struggle to destroy these men and women, and a small group of modern people searching for the Carriortus. (

Chamber Six*: Fantasy. Lord of the Rings and Clint Eastwood had a baby. The world of dwarves and elves grew up a little bit, and every species need to expand shoved the world east. The new desert and plains regions are lawless and brutal, forcing the population to seek justice elsewhere from their old world governments. Thus, the bounty hunters came into being, living by their own code. Wild magicks were harnessed in brass shells, and revolvers were created to fire them. With every fully loaded chamber a potpourri of flame and ice, lightning and mud, you never know what your opponent has in their sixth chamber. The story follows one aging bounty hunter who finds a new purpose in life thanks to a young and green bounty hunter, and a mysterious women with white eyes.

The Romance of an End**: Horror. In the wake of the civil war, near Chicago, one man hunts the zombies created by the war.

Scoured**: Science Fiction. Four army squads on a god-forsaken planet fight for survival against a savage enemy, savage wildlife, and an even more savage environment.

Ironbound**: Sci-fi/ Mystery. Ferric Decker killed the king. All Ferric has to do is get away with it. Should he do so, he will be crowned the next king. All Andrew has to do is prove that Ferric is a murderer.

With Human Flesh**: Fiction. In a world full of super heroes, one guy decides he wants to be a super hero. Except he has no powers. And isn't rich. Or in shape. Oh yes, he's also lazy.